And The Crowd Goes Mild: The 2012 Grammys

(Mark J. Terrill/AP) Justin Vernon searches for, and finds, impurities in his Grammys

It is impossible to watch the Grammys. I maintain that in the face of overwhelming evidence, not the least of which is the fact that I turned it on for twenty minutes last night. Not twenty sequential minutes, that would be dangerous, but enough to see backwoods bro Justin Vernon win two, to realize the Foo Fighters are still a thing, and to get totally exhausted by Nicki Minaj’s demon child gimmickry. The Grammys are objectively unentertaining, but they serve an important function, disclosing an appetite for pop that’s almost Zen in its avowal of an Eternal Now, when the only music worth listening to is playing right now on this revolution of a radio dial. The Grammys have no sense of any future except one in which Adele keeps selling a billion albums forever, and a feeling for the past so distant it has an unearthly cant, like it’s not even ours. This allows us to apply all our powers of snark towards a massive star-killer blog ray incinerating all the out of touch suits who presume to arbitrate tastes for us (we’re 16-24 DAMNIT). YEAH! Little Jimmy punts his radio and rides off, listening to some unholy Lightning Bolt CD-R, bleeding from the ears all the way.

But this is what we’re listening to, even if it won’t be a month from now. And the model of the record executive somehow young or savvy enough to find the ley lines of youth culture seems totally outdated at this point. Sure we’re bombarded with more marketing and advertising than we are stellar radiation, but we do the bulk of it ourselves. Some people out there still listen to Chris Brown (stop it by the way). For them he is an artist of great personal and musical charisma. His conduct is inexcusable and entirely his, but his career is our fault.

Beyond that, the Grammys have a necessary leveling effect on people like Nicki Minaj and Paul McCartney, whose lifestyles eat and shit out a thousand of mine in a day. At the Grammys their behavior can still seem “normal person” embarrassing; I had to flip back and forth from Nick Minaj’s performance I was wincing so hard.

I felt some affinity with the Grammys this year because I am also growing out of touch. Dubstep was the first youth oriented musical upwelling to completely confound me, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. When I turned 23 I made this 100+ track mix that was a big sloppy love letter to pop music, as I was certain I would only listen to “art” music thereafter. I failed, but now I think I just started too early. After 25+ years, you’ve witnessed the cycle repeat enough to gain some perspective. Now I feel closer to 12 minute high-hat drones, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Philip Glass, The Field etc.: little afterthoughts of dynamism against an undertone of geologic insistence. The worm turning in a constant soil.

But I’ve been wrong before. What pop music knows is that the method of life is seduction, and its movement is back into the fold.

For now: a little Keith to go out on.

Keith Fullerton Whitman – Stereo Music For Yamaha Disklavier Prototype

Blood From A Stone: Lana Del Rey, Authenticity, and Scare Quotes

A blogger's muse

A couple of days ago the Judge Dredd of pop music Sasha Frere-Jones fielded reader questions as part of a live chat about the authenticity of Lana Del Rey, the ostensible trailer park chanteuse who’s actually (gasp!) a vague composite of aggressive marketing and outsourced songwriting. I was impressed with the intelligence Frere-Jones brought to bear on the subject (probably more intelligence than it deserves), and I enjoy reading his column in every New Yorker I can steal, but I took issue with a particular strain of bewilderment that kept popping up in the Q&A:

“Artists promise us nothing specific. Songs can be terrible or badly conceived or embarrassing but I am still not sure what ‘inauthentic’ ever means. It feels like a Sasquatch nobody ever finds. It’s also possibly euphemistic and fancy way of saying ‘I don’t like this,’ which is always a valid response.”
-Sasha Frere-Jones

Frere-Jones seems willfully puzzled for the sake of aesthetic principle. It’s common among critics to forget how people without graduate degrees (a condition for which I’m bitterly nostalgic) approach media. Now that everyone loves Rick Ross and couldn’t possibly care whether anyone’s art is grounded in first hand experience the furor over LDR’s image might seem regressive. But Americans are good at this. Our one inarguable talent is consuming media. I don’t find it unsophisticated for listeners to grasp at the intent and worldview of artists who, at least formally, are communicating with them.

Frere-Jones draws an analogy to acting, noting that no one gives Meryl Streep a hard time for not actually being a prime minister, but this strikes me as a distortion. It might depend on whether you view pop musicians as essentially interpreters (or actors) or as generative, creative artists. Very few critics will agonize over what Rostropovich (genius that he was) thought or intended in recording a symphony but they will sure as hell want to know what was in Shostakovich’s dome when he wrote it. You might think of Lana, perfectly coiffed with a suite of on-call producers and songwriters, as just the interpreter of eminently available song structures and melodies but then you’d have to concede the same of Bob Dylan, to a lesser extent.

I don’t miss the indie pissing contests of the 90s or hip hop message board flamewars, but the author function doesn’t mean forgetting about the author and cavorting in a clear stream of pure sound. It means acknowledging the tendency to cobble together biographical detritus, images, and postures into a putative author who looms over the work and acknowledging that that tendency is at work when we talk about art. If we could fold LDR’s “inauthenticity” into an authorial figure that actually enriches our feeling for the music, then we would have something and could get off the internet for a while. But that would require an art equal to our patchwork mythos.

The reason we’re having this conversation at all is a) LDR is a attractive woman whose attractiveness is somehow a feature or theme in her music, with all the attendant gender complexities I have no authority to write about, and b) she fucked up. Here’s how:

1. Born to Die is a shit album guys. The fact that “Video Games” exists shines a harsh light on the other songs here, because the persona LDR cultivates in its ebb and flow of irony and sincerity somehow becomes gaudy and embarrassing on the rest of the album. When she sings “Heaven is a place on earth where you/ tell me all the things you want to do” I get that it’s withering sarcasm but can’t help but take pleasure in how beautiful it would be for someone to actually mean this. Born to Die is presented as more than a big, dumb, overwrought pop album, but the stabs at lyrical weight are weak everywhere but on “Video Games.” If you’re making an Important Statement with your music, your lyrics have to be either really good or just artless enough to be perfectly ignorable. But aggressively dumb and totally humorless is not a winning combo. Bottom line, what Born to Die is missing is pleasure, “the liquid tool” in the words of Brigit Kelly, which animates everything else. If we enjoyed this album, we wouldn’t have to entertain ourselves with this endless game of Guess Who?

2. The marketeers got overzealous and showed their hands (not necessarily her fault). If you’re trying to engineer a pop phenomenon you either hide that artifice  in plain sight or play it straight. No one thinks Lady Gaga is actually whatever the hell she plays on TV, but there are pictures of her in pre-breakthrough years being Lady Gaga. With LDR we’re talking about three people: the theoretical “real” Lizzy Grant, Lizzy Grant A.K.A. Lana Del Rey, and Lana Del Rey. The sleight is anything but seamless. Riding the hype lightning, LDR’s ad copy pushed too hard, protested too much. You’re not supposed to say you’re a “gangsta Nancy Sinatra.” The critics will say that about you for free! Elvis never called himself a sex bomb he just exploded in a horrifyingly sexy shower of sweat and pomade. By the time we saw the timid girl on SNL, the ad men had expertly taught us how to disassemble their product.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: Lester Bangs

Great job with the cover guys, looks like a self-published Masonic pamphlet

If you’re gonna bring ODB back to life, and I think you should, swing by and pick up Lester Bangs too. The unfairly but perhaps appropriately taken too soon critic died at 33, which means that, to a greater degree than most live fast types, he had a chance to grow up. And one of the chief pleasures of Psychotic Reactions is watching that happen, like A Clockwork Orange except with rotgut and Lou Reed rather than doped milk and Beethoven. The early essays are tainted, perhaps fatally, with beatnik fallout. For all their rambling, they do give a sense of how vital rock stars of the 60s were, even if now they’re ghoulish or embarrassing or both (oh God  the Who in that halftime show a few years back). But the paeans are the least interesting parts of this volume (and maybe music criticism in general if we’re going there). Lester was more interested in dismantling the idea of the rock star and in this he was aided by his ultimate frenemy Lou Reed, who had already started taking himself apart by the time Lester came around. The hilarious interviews with Reed and Lester’s perverse appreciation for Metal Machine Music are some of the best parts of the book, and go a long way towards a validation of rock music as something disgusting and truly offensive. And yet I admire how lucidly he resists figures like Richard Hell, apparently a perpetually suicidal black hole who thinks life is a joyless shitheap for him to flail around in. But give him a pass, he was young then. When you’re seventeen you just want to die and consume everything around you and then you get older and start taking gingko biloba because you’ve got work to do.

That’s the worst thing about Lester, he was old enough to know there was a future and he was writing better all the time. In an essay about Elvis written near the end of his life, Lester imagines becoming Elvis by digging through his intestines for the pills he had taken before he died. What results is something wholly alien to Pitchfork’s snide professionalism and Tinymixtapes’s graduate dissertations, something that can hardly belong solely to criticism. Lester got sophisticated without losing any of his nerve, which makes it truly sad that he isn’t raving about Ke$ha with a bomb strapped to his chest today.

Book Fuel: Counter Culture’s La Golondrina

12 ounces uncut Colombian

The great thing about coffee is that you can have a 20 minute conversation about it without anybody suspecting you’re actually talking about drugs. And like the latter industry, though the Columbians have traditionally done it best, the Kenyans and Ethiopians are definitely in heavy contention. In recent years with third wave espresso caffeinating the nation I feel like a lot of bean fiends have moved out of the deep roasty darkness into the brighter, subtler, dare I say fruitier light. I’ve always been on team light n’ bright (if you got blackcurrant in there then damnit I want to taste it) though there will always be a place in my heart for dark and hearty blends (family gatherings, all nighters, hangover medication).

But I have the palate of a golden retriever when it comes to these things. I get into the good graces of baristas by answering all their leading questions in the affirmative (“You getting that coconut?” “Oh fuck yeah it’s coming on real strong now.”) Further, I don’t know if that’s taste that’s sparking pleasure nodes or the drugs fording the blood-brain barrier. Like anything though, it’s more fun when you ruin other people’s fun by being pretentious so I’ve been practicing my coffee nerd spiel. I brew everything in the french press for maximum righteousness and I always drink it black first even if I put a little milk in it later on. The result is that I’m marginally better at picking up flavors and it is now impossible for me to enjoy normal people coffee. Mission accomplished I guess. Let’s take a crack at Counter Culture’s La Golondrina.

What They Say: Sourced directly from Cauca’s most skilled and quality-focused organic farmers, La Golondrina represents the very best of Colombian coffee with layered flavors of caramel, chocolate, cherry, and bright citrus.

What I Taste: Basically none of that. There’s definitely some darker sweetness going on, something like burnt cake (which I assume is on the caramel-cocoa continuum) and a sourness I’ve tracked over land and sea to the cherry notes. Honestly it’s good but not my fave. The flavors seem muddier than CC’s other brews and it doesn’t have the same kind of putting the spurs to Hidalgo energy that I associate with Columbian coffee. But it gets about 75% of your bull running.

The Feeling: Getting dust in your eyes on a mountaintop, but in a good way.

More WIDIOR: Teengirl Fantasy/James Blake

I wasn’t able to successfully care about James Blake (not the tennis player, him I’m always pulling for) until about halfway through his second song at Webster hall Wednesday night. Even “The Wilhelm Scream” felt kind of tired to me; catchy, nice, sure, but I don’t find dubstep as a genre very convincing and I didn’t understand why this kid Jimmy was so goddamn important. Well, this show didn’t make me a believer but I Get It now. When he played this short pretty piano interlude “Give Me My Month” I got the music tingle (v. different from the poetry tingle) where it feels like you’re about to have a filthily indulgent full body cry. In general I dug the slower numbers more than the big beat shit, but the end result is I can’t hate anymore, which sucks. James, you have denied me one of life’s great pleasures: the deep joy of playa hatin. And really he was so gracious as a performer. Neither bewildered nor jaded by all the attention he’s gotten in the past year. He’s one of those guys my grandmother would deem “such a nice boy.”

Blake’s real weapon is his voice, which is odd because it’s not that good in conventional terms. It has that persistent quaver, where it’s constantly about to break, which grants a different sort of pathos or charge to both the quiet, unplugged songs and the more traditional dubsteppy, beats and burnt electronics songs. It took me a while to realize this, but James needs to send Antony Hegarty a big fat weepy thank you note, re: quavery vocals. But I think it’s his genre wizardry with all the gospel influence that keeps it out of the realm of homage.

It was a great concert. Teengirl Fantasy looked like the Mario Brothers if they had fallen in love with house music and blow instead of plumbing and shrooms. The only downside was my placement next to this buzzkill hipster girl who was like a whine singularity. If I heard right, she started flipping out because everyone was pressed up against each other and she could feel the hair on my arms. Listen honey, I know two things about the world. One is that I’m a black Irish beast and I will never be sorry about it. And the other is that it’s a show and you’re gonna be very close to other people. My ass has been polished to a lustrous sheen by all the drunk and clumsy inadvertent groping I’ve suffered from years of seeing music. Just deal.

What I Did Instead of Reading: Ed Askew/Bill Callahan

A seersucker suit, check out the stones on this guy

I hate going to concerts alone because there is not a way to look even remotely cool between sets. While everybody else is rocking anti-gravity haircuts and downing PBRs with their hot friends, I have to pretend to be really interested in my phone or that my entourage just all went to the bathroom at once. But I’m willing to do it for it Bill Callahan. This man is a true fucking American bard while also being totally strange and completely out of step with any kind of current American music I can think of. There was a New Yorker piece a while back when Apocalypse came out in which he said he never really liked Bob Dylan, or thought much about him at all. Never. Liked. Dylan. How many other folk troubadours could rightfully claim that they weren’t dominated by his influence? But Callahan is resolutely weird. “Drover” off the new album, which Callahan and his band completely scorched, conjures the sort of range life Americana that we don’t even bother to romanticize anymore. And yet it’s impossible to determine the irony or sincerity quotient of this song. It doesn’t really lend itself to those terms.

Callahan’s voice is an odd beast. Beautiful to be sure, but there’s something arch or ugly about it, that makes it seem as if he has purposefully complicated or resisted his talent. As opposed to someone to like The National’s Matt Berninger, whose voice is pure Aunt Jemima, Callahan’s seems to filter any sweetness or affect before it has time to make a song one kind of song or the other. Consider a song like “Rock Bottom Riser,” which WAS NOT PLAYED that night (thanks asshole who upstaged me with the “River Guard” request). This song absolutely hurts my soul. And yet it has embedded in it a cracked little waltz with a buoyant, almost flippant intonation that deepens what would otherwise be a song of mythic devotion. And it’s better for it. As some dead Italian guy said about Baroque opera, “let no pure art go unsullied.”

They played for what must have been almost two hours. Callahan went through a bunch of Apocalypse cuts, an absolutely ridiculous, goosebumpy take on “Too Many Birds,” and then some Smog stuff. I was surprised to see someone I thought was a pure strummer get into some volcanic Sonic Youth style noise breakdowns. So many of his songs are simple, warped plucking that you forget the guy’s a nimble, virtually face melting guitarist when  he wants to be. And he’s a very generous performer. For the encore he came out saying he was “taking requests” and played for another half hour. The only songs I really missed were “Rock Bottom Riser” and “Teenage Spaceship,” which I’m sure if I had been more of a douche about “requesting” he would have played. And yeah, he’s really making seersucker happen.

Rock Bottom Riser – (Smog)